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Saturday, January 31, 2015

Wachowski Reloaded, Part 3: The Matrix (1999)

Countdown to Jupiter Ascending, Part 3, in which the Wachowskis drag us kicking and screaming into the 21st century with this landmark film...

I’ll
be honest with you; I was a little nervous in writing this one up.

Because
make no mistake about it: The Matrix was
a seismic shift in the filmic landscape, in many ways the first true
twenty-first century film. The Wachowskis took the clockwork precision of their
camera on Bound and multiplied the
budget and ambition tenfold, and the results are as predictably spectacular as
one might imagine, winding up with a movie that is true to the mathematical
definition of its title, only instead of having the rows and columns filled
with numbers, it’s the legion of influences which include cyberpunk, Asian
action movies and cutting-edge anime. The
Matrix is such a blending of high- and low-art that it makes such
delineations obsolete; a sci-fi concoction owing to the works of Phillip K.
Dick and Beaudrillard that comments on our media-saturated corporate culture,
but with gun-fu and kicksplosions. In short, The Matrix is kind of fucking awesome.

Revolutionary,
as well. It terms of action filmmaking, it brought cinema up to an entirely
different level. The action films of Hollywood had long gone stale at that
point, and seemed to be aware of it, what with their desire to appropriate the
Hong Kong action stalwarts into their glossy, big-budget fold, but it was The Matrix that proved to be the tipping
point. If you were to look at a map of action cinema history missing the slot
where The Matrix goes, you could
still be able to pinpoint its location with relative ease, just by the sheer
amount of films where everyone is all of a sudden obsessed with slow-motion
bullet hits and wire-assisted martial arts. By hiring the legendary master Yuen
Woo-ping and putting the lead actors through an intense, four-month training
regimen, the filmmakers ensured that the action would carry an air of
authenticity (looking at the movie now, as fantastic as much of it is as a
whole, the fight choreography is noticeably staged and blocky; tailor-made for
actors who weren’t used to fighting) - so much so that for a while there in
Hollywood, if your big action movie didn’t have some legendary Hong Kong fight
choreographer, you might as well just pack your bags and go on home (I can
still remember promos for 2001’s The
Musketeer proudly proclaiming it as “featuring choreography from Xin Xin
Xiong”).

Also
important to the film’s success was its implementation of effects-work. Much
like Star Wars before it, The Matrix utilized the special effects
of its day to show just what was possible in cinema. The movie came at a
watershed moment for visual effects, where CGI was a significant element, but
not yet the dominant presence it would become in effects-driven films, where CG
became less a tool and more of a crutch. What was key to The Matrix’s success with its effects was creating a world where
such visual ideas were plausible. Action heroes’ ability to dodge bullets and
outrun explosions were already a source of eye-rolling by the time The Matrix came around, but by making
the characters avatars in a digital world, the Wachowskis were able to reinvent
that cliché, as breaking gravity and the laws of physics became key to the
world and the story being told. The elaborate bullet-time sequences are visual
feats that still look incredible to this day, making action previously only
capable on the comic book page come screaming into life believably in
live-action, but their true effectiveness lies in tying them into a story that
has gotten the audience invested and tricked them into buying into this world that
the film invents. That makes The Matrix
still possibly the best cinematic display of superpowers, just in terms of
audience investment.

An
investment that is well-developed by the script, which manages a deceptive
amount of simplicity and infinite amounts of complexity. The Wachowskis’ script
for The Matrix is one written by
thoughtful filmmakers just biting at the bit for a chance to make a movie,
containing almost an entire lifetime’s worth of ideas and concepts. The same
storytelling hunger that was present in Bound’s
twists and subversions also permeate The
Matrix - just like Lucas with Star
Wars, the Wachowskis implement the hero’s journey and mythic structure into
their sci-fi parable, but not in the Mad Gabs, “insert story beat/character arc
here” way that countless unimaginative hacks have driven into the ground over
the years. Instead, the Wachowskis use those tropes and clichés to their own
ends; there’s nothing inherently wrong with those tried-and-true Campbellian
approaches, after all, it’s just all in how they’re implemented. Take Neo’s
journey throughout the movie: the surface elements all follow the typical
“Chosen One” ballyhoo, but look deeper at what the film portrays and you begin
to see the Wachowskis at play, subverting that simple mythic structure and
making it a key point to the story they’re telling. Neo is not the One simply
because the story demands it, like so many of the children of Star Wars - he must first earn it. What
Morpheus tells him towards the end of the film holds true for those lesser
movies and their unimaginative screenwriters every bit as much as it does for
Neo: “There’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.”

Taking
away all of the effects and influences and philosophizing, the film is still
remarkable in its construction. The first time I saw The Matrix was one of the first times I became aware of pace. Look
at the final acts of the movie, once Neo and the others leave after visiting
the wonderfully without pretense Oracle, and the way the film smoothly flows
from one scene into the other. From there, we are taken to Morpheus’ capture
all the way to the lobby shoot-out and the helicopter rescue, and from there to
the final showdown between Neo and Agent Smith - it’s a master-class on pacing
a film and having one event seamlessly flow into the next without interruption.
The central mystery of “What is the Matrix?” that occupies roughly the first
hour also plays out with effective panache, with each reveal that Neo is
exposed to coming with just enough explanation to carry the movie forward: Neo
leaves the Matrix at about the thirty minute mark, whereupon we’re then taken
into the real world, a reveal so shocking and massive that it still works for
me to this day, sixteen years on and countless viewings in the meantime, and I
think a large part of the reveal’s success comes from its careful construction
and placement in the story.

There’s
so much to talk about when discussing The
Matrix: it’s central concept of the nature of reality and whether or not
that’s reflected in the world around us - a question that’s been around almost
from the moment humanity could stop having to worry about its day-to-day
survival and pause to ponder such things - reshaped and presented in such a way
by the film that it similarly had movie-goers wondering if they were caught in
the Matrix themselves, once they stopped raving to themselves how cool it was
when that girl in the leather pants kicked that one dude… Or the dry,
incredibly deadpan sense of humor that keeps the movie from taking itself too
seriously, a sensibility that the otherwise impenetrable themes of the
narrative desperately needed… Or how Neo transcends the physical action the
genre demands at the end by literally stopping bullets and rewriting the
villain’s code from the inside out… Or how each and every frame is so
graphically composed it looks like it could be a panel of the best sci-fi comic
you never read… Or how the film took that dystopian Blade Runner aesthetic and paranoid, X-Files­-esque “they’re all out to get you” vibe of the nineties
and pushed them into the more cautiously-optimistic, coming of the Age of Horus
sensibility of the new millennium (which, newsflash, didn’t quite turn out to
be all that)… There are literally pages that could be written about every
minute of this movie.

If Bound established them as filmmakers to
be watched, then The Matrix pushed
the Wachowskis into genuine force-of-nature territory. This duo was not content
to sit back and produce the simple entertainments that had held their attention
in their youth, but instead looked at the staid field that surrounded them and
thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” For good or ill, they would settle for
nothing less than to push the medium as far as they could each time they
started a new project, and, at least in The
Matrix’s case, they wound up pushing the entire industry around them
further, too. The fantasy/SF author Michael Moorcock once said that all
storytellers take part in a giant pot of inspiration, where old ideas are taken
out and new ones put back in their place. If that’s the case, then while the
Wachowskis took their fair share from that communal pot, they certainly put
back in a whole hell of a lot more.